


System Restore

by inlovewithnight



Category: Iron Man (2008), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:32:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	System Restore

When Scott finally gives up and lets himself fall to the floor, exhausted and bruised and shaky from head to toe, he looks up and sees Tony watching him from the doorway.

Tony looks around the room, from the overturned weight racks to the gutted punching bags to the shattered mirrors. Scott swallows against an apology and shrugs instead, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Tony nods thoughtfully and looks at Scott again. "Anything you break, I can replace." He doesn't sound angry, or amused, or much of anything, really; he's just stating facts. "Knock yourself out."

He switches the light off and closes the door behind him, leaving Scott kneeling in the dark with shards of glass under his palms. Tony can replace anything that breaks. Must be nice to be the man who has everything.  
**  
The man who has everything has an in-home computer that must be unnerving if you're not used to living with telepaths. Scott is not at all prone to flinching at voices coming from the walls.

"Play it again," he tells the computer. It sighs petulantly before it does.

The footage is amazing, because it shouldn't exist. Tony must be tied into some frighteningly high-level security networks to get his hands on this.

Scott watches what happened at the Golden Gate from the beginning, like he has a dozen times already. He watches Jean try to end the world. He watches her attack Logan. He watches Logan kill her.

He has the computer run that part back a few times.

"Are you going to go destroy the gymnasium again, sir?" the computer asks. Scott runs his fingers over the scars on his face, following them to his neck and his shoulder, giving up before trying to trace them under his shirt. They're the reminder of how she tried to take him apart, until she got distracted. The same way she took those soldiers apart, the way she would've taken Logan apart if his mutation hadn't come in handy.

"No," he tells the computer. "Get rid of the windows. I'm going back to bed."  
**  
"I think I could fix that for you," Tony says one morning, sitting at the foot of Scott's bed. Or, well, really it's Tony's own guest bed that Scott's been using for...God, two months now. He's going to have to start paying rent. Or at least making himself useful polishing the flight suits, or something.

The closet is full of clothes that are much too expensive for Scott to want to touch. He has explained this to Tony, but Tony raises selective listening to an art form even more than Logan ever did. He pushes back through the designer suits and one-of-a-kind shirts, looking for the jeans and t-shirts that keep getting moved to the back. "Fix what?"

"Your eyes."

Scott pauses and looks back over his shoulder. "Excuse me?"

"It must be tied in to the nervous system, right? We run some scans, figure out which nerve it is, and then I'll go in and..."

"And _what_?"

Tony shrugs cheerfully. "Inhibit it."

Scott turns back to the closet, shaking his head in disbelief. "Stay away from me."

"Hey, come on. I had open-heart surgery in a cave. Twice. We'd at least do your brain surgery in the kitchen."

"Tony."

"Okay, okay, the lab. God, you're picky."

"You're not touching my eyes." Scott finally finds a t-shirt, all the way in the back, barely hanging on to its hanger. "I might need them one of these days."  
**  
Scott asks Tony if he has a bike Scott could take out. He doesn't, but the next day he buys Scott one.

"You have got to stop doing stuff like this," Scott tells him, staring at the gorgeous, top-of-the-line thing parked next to the flight suits.

"Why?"

"Because it's...insane, to spend this much money."

Tony laughs at him, which Scott is getting used to. "It's not that much money. Really. You have to think of it in relative terms, Summers."

"You can't just..."

"I can, and I do. Frequently. Here." Tony pulls one of the wheeled toolbox towers over to the bike. "I assume you're going to want to customize and supercharge and generally have a good time. I know I would."

"You going to stick around and help?"

"Nah." Tony grins and takes off his shirt, revealing the black bodysuit underneath. "I'm going to go save the world. Tell Pepper I'll be back for dinner."

Scott shakes his head, but he's smiling, too, as he opens the top of the toolbox. "You're deranged."

"It's called seizing the moment, Summers." Tony walks over to his launch zone and throws his head back, raising his arms for the suit like some kind of wizard calling up the sea. "Look it up."  
**  
Once he has the bike running the way he wants it, he spends as much time out of the house as in it, tearing up as many miles of the California highways as he can. Beats staring at the walls any day, even Tony's walls with their control panels and very expensive art.

He always makes it back before midnight, because he doesn't harbor any illusions that Tony won't come find him if he doesn't. Tony found him in the woods in Canada when he wasn't even looking for anything more specific than "Why did that lake just explode?" If Tony actually sets up Scott Summers as his goal, Scott doesn't stand a chance without a spontaneous secondary mutation of invisibility.

Or mind control, but he's pretty much over telepathy as a good idea, these days.

On the return trip from one long ride, Tony finds him anyway, drafting him from twenty feet above until Scott gives in and pulls over. "What?" Scott asks, pulling off his helmet and raking his fingers through sweat-dense hair. "I was going to make it home for dinner, Dad."

"Please," Tony says, or rather the suit says, stern and deliberately more artificial than it has to be. "I'm the cool older brother, not Dad."

"Tony..."

"Scott." Tony flips up the faceplate on his helmet and looks at Scott, and for the very first time there's a flash of frustration there, blended with irritation, a combination that Scott's very familiar with. It's any teacher's reaction to a student who stubbornly refuses to _get it_.

What _it_ is, Scott has no idea, which is probably why he's missing it by a mile.

"See you at home," Tony says abruptly, closing the faceplate and blasting off before Scott can respond. Scott exhales roughly and fires up the bike again, pushing the helmet down over his head and wondering why the whole rest of the world seems to take place in some kind of code.  
**  
It's been six months. He isn't sure how that happened, but it has.

It seems appropriate to mark the date somehow, so he gets ragingly drunk on Tony's very expensive scotch and asks the computer to do some research for him.

Apparently Xavier's school is doing very well without Xavier, Summers, or Grey. He probably should've been able to guess that.

He tells the computer to do something anatomically unlikely given that it's a network of chips and wires built into a house, drinks the rest of the scotch, and passes out on the floor.  
**  
"Jarvis told me you were looking up the old gang." Tony lines up a row of bottles on the coffee table, some boutique brand of beer Scott's never heard of. Scott's head is still pounding from the scotch, and even the thought of beer turns his stomach. He has a feeling Tony knows that and is doing this on purpose.

"Trying to get the band back together?" Tony asks, moving one bottle an eighth of an inch to the left.

"No."

Tony nods solemnly, moving another bottle, trying to get the lineup perfect. "Just checking in, then. What they're all up to. How they're doing. Where to address the Christmas cards."

"Something like that."

"Holiday cards, actually. I bet you're all non-denominational and try not to be Christian-centric."

"Is there a point coming up any time soon, Tony?" Scott can hear his own tone of voice and knows Logan would call it snotty. Tony is not Logan, and thank God for that.

"A point?" Tony adjusts another bottle and sits back on his heels, studying the whole setup and not looking at Scott. "I don't know. Sort of. Define point." Scott shakes his head in disgust and takes a step back like he's going to leave. It's a feint and they both know it, but Tony lets the moment stretch out just long enough that starting to talk again looks like his own idea. "Look, okay, let me put this in the form of a question."

He takes a deep breath and Scott waits, trying not to grind his teeth. Tony is so damn...theatrical.

"Are you planning a career change to supervillain?"

Scott almost chokes, almost blinks behind his glasses, almost takes a step back. He doesn't quite, because he's learned to roll with surprises, but _Jesus_. "What?"

"It's a pretty standard villain narrative. C'mon, they took your life, they're moving on without you, they offed your mentor, killed your girlfriend, check all that apply."

"My girlfriend killed my mentor. Actually." His throat feels tight. "And only civilians say 'supervillain.'"

"It's succinct." Tony gets to his feet and circles the table slowly, still not bothering to look at Scott. "Snappy."

Scott shakes his head in sharp irritation. "Don't have your computer spy on me anymore, okay?"

"Jarvis alerts me to any behavior that cross-references to the category of 'so-and-so took what ought to be mine.'" Tony lifts the bottle from the very center of the line, pops the cap on the back of a chair, and takes a drink. "I'm a little touchy about that one. Paranoid. Jarvis has my back."

All conversations with Tony seem to require that someone end up feeling lost and confused. And it's never _Tony_. "I'm not going to go supervillain, Tony."

"I hope not. You're really not cut out for it." Tony drains the bottle in a few long swallows and tosses it into a can in the corner. Scott has no idea what the point was of making that careful line of bottles in the first place. "You're a good guy. If you feel the urge coming on, let me know. We'll come up with something to take the edge off."

Scott laughs a little, thinking of all the possible options Tony Stark might come up with to _take the edge off_. He doubts he has enough of an imagination to even begin. "Can I fly one of the suits?"

Tony grins and holds a bottle out to him. "You wanna?"  
**  
"What do you want to do with your life?" Tony asks him, another moment in the lab that Scott has no idea how to classify as morning, afternoon, or night. Time gets away from you there.

"What?" He tightens a bolt on one of Tony's prototypes and steps back, frowning. "Why do you care?"

"You really have to ask, Summers?"

"Obviously, or I wouldn't have."

"Yeah, good point." Tony frowns at the prototype, then at the holographic image of it hovering over his workbench. "This is all wrong."

"Why do you care?"

"Because if it's all wrong it might explode while I'm flying it over the Pacific Ocean."

"Tony."

Tony snaps his fingers and the hologram vanishes. Suddenly he's looking at Scott in dead earnest, an expression that's rare coming from him and that Scott hasn't had a chance to get used to. "Because you're a good guy and you've helped out a lot of people and you damn well deserve it in return just this once."

Scott pushes his glasses a little higher on his nose. There is absolutely no response he can give to that.

"Even if you are incredibly annoying." Tony picks up a wrench and starts dismantling the prototype. "What do you want to do with your life, Summers? Since you've still got one."

Scott's throat is dry when he answers. "I have no idea."

"Then what do you want to do right now?"

Scott looks over at the suits, but something holds him back. This isn't the time for wrapping himself up in an artificial skin and breathing through a mask. He needs to be...connected. Grounded.

He sets his own wrench aside and stretches slowly. "Let's run."  
**  
Six miles up the canyon Tony silently signals a truce and they both descend to a slow jog, then stop at the side of the path, wiping the sweat from their foreheads with their sleeves and falling into a coordinated pattern of rough but even breathing.

"I'm not really a solo kind of guy," Scott says after a moment, and Tony glances sideways at him, looking not at all startled by the non sequitur. "I like having a team."

"Ah." Tony nods slowly and wipes his face again. "See, I _am_ a solo act. Well, I don't mind having a supporting cast, or some adoring fans, but I've got to be the headliner. It's a thing."

Scott smiles slightly. "It's your ego, you mean."

"Well, yeah. Maybe." Tony shrugs and grins. "Not ego if you've earned it, right?"

Scott looks up, tracing the path of a plane as it cuts across the sky. "I think I could handle being backup for a while," he says, more to himself than to Tony. "Until I get my head on straight. Figure out that whole 'what do I want' thing you keep talking about."

"I could use some tech support." Tony puts his hand up when Scott tilts his head in dangerous question. "Fixing the gear. Testing it out. Helping with the models, improving them, that kind of thing. Not...whatever you were thinking. Jeez, you're touchy."

Scott walks in a slow circle, trying to keep his muscles from setting up. "What about a day job?" he asks after a minute. "Some of us like to work for a living."

"And that's an impulse I'll _never_ understand." Tony bounces in place, his head tipped back in thought. "There's a community college that needs somebody to teach, well, shop, basically. Cars, bikes, which I believe you've done before."

"I have. Along with physics, math, and advanced combat strategies."

"They might need any combination of those, really. Usually I just send checks, but I can make some calls." Tony glances over at him again. "I take that to mean you're going to be sticking around?"

Scott makes him wait a minute for an answer. Tony's going to have to get used to not getting everything he wants the minute he wants it. Not an easy lesson for the man who has everything, but Scott's a pretty good teacher. "Yeah. I'm in."


End file.
